Written by 
Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond.
Like podcasts better than blog posts? Listen to ATP #596 for more!
What’s new
- Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more accessible.
- Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on today’s phone sizes.
- Improvements throughout, such as undoing large seeks, new playlist-priority options, easier navigation, and more.
What’s not
- Most features. Overcast is still Overcast!
- The audio engine. It’s the best part of Overcast, and still leads the industry in sound quality, silence skipping, and volume normalization. (More soon!)
- The business. I’m still a one-person operation, with no funding or external ownership, serving only my customers.
- My principles. I always want to make the best podcast app, and I’ll never disrespect your time, attention, or privacy.
What’s gone
Streaming. Most big podcasts now use dynamic ad insertion, which causes bugs and problems for streaming playback.1 Downloading episodes completely before they begin playback is much more reliable.
Tapping a non-downloaded episode will now open the playback screen, download it, then start playback. It works similarly to the way streaming did before, but playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered.
On today’s fast networks, this usually only takes a few extra seconds.
And in the near future, I’ll be adding smarter options and more control over selective downloading of episodes to further improve the experience for people who don’t automatically download every episode.
What’s next
- The last few missing features from the old app, such as Shortcuts support, storage management, and OPML. These are absent now, but will return soon.
- More options for downloading and deleting episodes.
- Upgrading the Apple Watch app to the new, faster sync engine. (The Watch app is currently unchanged from the previous one.)
And, of course, more features, including some of your most-requested features over the last decade.
Getting this rewrite out the door was a monumental task. Thank you for your patience as I work through this list!
Why?
Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person.
That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years.
You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted.
For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.
Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better.
Thank you all so much for the first decade of Overcast.
Here’s to the next one.